Dealing with anxiety as Election Day nears
“Embrace uncertainty,” a friend said recently. He was speaking about life, not politics, but his words resonate as I consider the questions raised by this election and by the events of the past four years. Anxiety expands within me like a cancer as Election Day draws near. The emotional timing is illogical: Millions of votes have been cast already, and it’s far from clear that we’ll know where things stand when I fall into bed in the early morning of Nov. 4. Expecting closure anytime soon, if ever, seems naive.
My friend’s point was that we should recognize the limits of what we can control and avoid obsessing about what’s out of our hands — pretty much everything except our own behavior. This is difficult even in the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. Most of us cling to assumptions that provide a measure of stability. We assume, for example, that our leaders will observe certain standards of decorum, what my mother would have called good manners. When we see these assumptions assaulted, day after day, we feel disconnected. Fear rushes in to fill the widening fissures within us.
Perhaps my use of the first-person plural is presumptuous. It’s clear that millions of Americans don’t share my assumptions. So here, in the singular, is a partial list of my fears in this moment: I’m afraid the drive-thru vote I cast two weeks ago will be thrown out because of a pending legal challenge. (In the past I would have assumed that no court would retroactively disenfranchise more than 100,000 people, but now anything seems possible.) I’m afraid close outcomes in battleground states and baseless allegations of fraud will lead Republican-controlled legislatures to disregard the voters and choose their own presidential electors — something I only recently learned was possible. I’m afraid litigation and wild accusations will create so much doubt about the election outcome that the country will descend into chaos and violence that drives its citizens into the treacherous embrace of authoritarianism. Is this paranoia? I didn’t come up with these ideas on my own. Maybe I just consume too much news.
I’m afraid that even if things settle into something like normalcy and a new administration begins to function, we’ll remain vulnerable to the forces that gave us QAnon; the notion that the novel coronavirus “is going to disappear”; “very fine people on both sides”; militant resistance to public health measures such as wearing masks; a belief that journalists are evil; and tolerance for insults hurled at a disabled reporter, a Gold Star family and a man who endured torture as a prisoner of war. I’m afraid people of color will continue to die unjust deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers who aren’t held accountable and that lawful protests against these acts will be suppressed with weapons and tactics intended for use against our enemies. I’m afraid the words of William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” were not just poetry, but prophecy:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .
Learned voices advise us to avert panic through patience and perspective. In his 2018 book, “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” Jon Meacham reminds us that this nation and its most vital institutions have survived similarly troubling moments: the Southern campaign to overturn the reforms of Reconstruction after the Civil War; the outrages of the McCarthy era; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Yet whatever reassurance I found in Meacham’s book has faded. Words on a page, however skillfully crafted, don’t trigger the same emotional reactions as events within our own experience. I was born in the 1950s, and I remember crouching under my school desk during Cold War drills, as if that flimsy object could protect me from a nuclear attack. I remember the assassinations and riots of the 1960s; Watergate in the ’70s; and of course, 9/11. This moment feels different, perhaps because I’ve reached a more reflective stage of life. Or perhaps because it truly is different.
“Embrace uncertainty” is good advice, but it requires more discipline, or wisdom, than I can muster right now. I miss my old assumptions, my old certainties. If my prior sense of the world was illusory, I’ll take the illusions.